PORTLAND, Ore.—As both an astrophysicist and director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), Mike Norman understands two common perspectives on archiving massive scientific datasets. During a live demonstration at the SC09 conference of streaming data simulating cosmic structures of the early universe, Norman said that some center directors view their data archives as "black holes,"… Read More

BERKELEY, CA — Once a year, InformationWeek magazine honors the most innovative players in the field of information technology, including the top 10 government agency innovators. And on Sept. 14, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) was recognized as a member of this select group for its work helping thousands of researchers worldwide manage the massive… Read More

IT professionals in government, as in all industries, are under pressure. Sure, resources are tight, and legacy IT systems and processes are the norm, but there's also a growing expectation among the public that government agencies be more transparent and efficient and that their services be Web-enabled. What are government IT organizations to do?
Many are getting creative in how they apply … Read More

BERKELEY, CA — As scientists in a wide variety of disciplines increasingly rely on supercomputers and collaboration with colleagues around the world to advance their research, managing and sharing the mountain of data generated by their investigations will soon become a choking point. In order to facilitate such data-intensive research, ESnet, the Department of Energy’s high-performance… Read More

As scientists in a wide variety of disciplines increasingly rely on supercomputers and collaboration with colleagues around the world to advance their research, managing and sharing the mountain of data generated by their investigations will soon become a choking point. In order to facilitate such data-intensive research, ESnet, the Department of Energy’s high-performance networking… Read More

Most network traffic is transmitted on a “best effort” basis, meaning that there's a pretty good chance the packets will arrive as intended. But for the Department of Energy (DOE) researchers around the world who are sharing massive scientific datasets, the “best” just isn't good enough. Now, researchers can reserve bandwidth on Energy Sciences Network's (ESnet) circuit-oriented Science… Read More

The Energy Department has started implementing Domain Name System Security Extensions on its high-performance Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), using a commercial appliance to digitally sign DNS records and manage cryptographic keys.
The first zones on the network were signed July 8 and it will be at least another month before necessary software updates and testing are completed, and signed… Read More

Although it has been a network protocol standard for more than 10 years, IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) has only been minimally implemented by the networking community. But that could change now that the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) has deployed a production IPv6 management system across its entire network.
ESnet is one of the world’s leading networks… Read More

An innovative new sky survey, called the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), will utilize the unique tools and services offered by the Department of Energy's (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) to expose relatively rare and fleeting cosmic events, like supernovae and gamma ray bursts.
In fact, during the… Read More

As scientists conduct cutting-edge research with ever more sophisticated techniques, instruments, and supercomputers, the data sets that they must move, analyze, and manage are increasing in size to unprecedented levels. The ability to move and share data is essential to scientific collaboration, and in support of this activity network and systems engineers from the Department of Energy's… Read More

In the arena of high-performance networking, it’s easy to track down “hard failures” such as when someone breaks or cuts through a fiber link. But identifying “soft failures,” like dirty fibers or router processor overload, is challenging. Such soft failures still allow network packets to get through, but can cause a network to run 10 times slower than it should and also account for the… Read More

The Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), the Korea Research Environment Open Network2 and the Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications Development achieved a sustained data transfer rate of 1 gigabit per second (Gbps), equivalent to transporting 120 minutes of video per second, between the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and the Korea Institute of Science and… Read More

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), a high-speed network linking tens of thousands of researchers around the nation, was honored on April 14, 2009 with an Excellence.Gov award for its achievements in leveraging technology.
The Excellence.Gov awards are sponsored by the Industry Advisory Council's (IAC) Collaboration and Transformation Shared… Read More

Throughout February and March, ESnet engineers continued to upgrade hardware and network capabilities at its regional network sites across the country.
Upgrades to the Bay Area Metropolitan Area Network (BAMAN) were completed earlier this month when Cisco routers at NERSC’s Oakland Scientific Facility and the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek were replaced with hardware from Juniper’s MX… Read More